


Knowing when to quit

by Knappedama



Category: Original Work
Genre: Boss/Employee Relationship, F/M, Friends to Lovers, happy housekeeper, quirky recluse, us against the world
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2019-06-05
Updated: 2019-06-05
Packaged: 2020-04-08 11:43:47
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,480
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/19106410
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Knappedama/pseuds/Knappedama
Summary: A quirky recluse with a blood sugar problem and a stubborn housekeeper try to maneuver social interaction.Soundtrack with an abundance of Elvis.





	Knowing when to quit

 

# Chapter 1: The announcement

 

Elvis crooned about being so lonely he could die, shaking his hips in my head, all the way down to heartbreak hotel. I wiped down the counters, stopping every now and then shaking my hips in sympathy with the poor man. Even though he had been dead for almost forty years, he still emoted so well I could feel it in my bones. My phone in the docking station switched tracks, his songs never lasted too long, and suddenly I was headbopping and emptying the dishwasher, stacking plates in the cupboard, wondering what kind of name Polk Salad Annie was. I’d never really wondered before, just learned the words, mouthing them as rich deep notes slithered inside my ears and into my brain pan.

I spun around, aiming for the dishcloth lying on the kitchen island when a shadow in the doorway made me jump and shriek like a banshee, clutching my chest and hyperventilating. The shadow didn’t move.

”Holy cow! Make some noise, will you?” I exclaimed, squinting to make out the face of my employer. A smooth jaw and dark eyes stared back. Not a single muscle twitch to trace on his stoic face. He was like a statue, made of the hardest granite around.

Elvis kept up his ching-ching-a-linging, and I felt a hint of embarrassment that quickly got squashed under a chin tilt, and faith in my own taste in music. I liked what I liked, and that was that.

“Sorry,“ he murmured, his tone so far from sincere, they had probably never met. Six-degrees of separation and all that. This was at least a ten, which meant it was somewhere on the moon, or Mars. He walked over to stand across from me, the solid kitchen island between us. He didn’t sit down on one of the bar stools, but chose to stay standing, resting a hand on the wooden countertop.

He cleared his throat, “Uhm, a glass of water. Please.” The “please” was obviously tacked on by the voice in his head reminding him that slavery had indeed been abolished some time ago, even in a backwoods town like ours.

“Sure!” I chirped, determined to raise the level of positivity in the room from sub par to somewhere around middling. I suspected I had a lot of chirping to do to accomplish such a feat, but I considered the challenge and accepted without hesitation. I was nothing if not serious about my optimism. No way was this black hole of grey clouds and kicked puppy dogs going to darken my mood, no sir.

I poured him a glass of ice water from the pitcher I always kept in the fridge. I’d learned quickly that my employer preferred his water just above freezing. No ice, though. If it got too warm, he simply wouldn’t drink it. Water with ice cubes seemed like cheating, and he never asked for ice otherwise. It was one of the many quirks I’d picked up on, and nowhere near the strangest one.

For some reason, all the chairs and tables had to be angled just so, even if you were coming right back to it, and God forbid if you forgot to close the door to the hallway bathroom. I thought it was an OCD thing, but I wasn’t a professional in psychological disorders, so I kept my opinions to myself. Really, I wasn’t much of a professional anything, though I did get paid to keep house, so I guess I was a housekeeper. A visiting friend had once called me the maid. That rankled a bit, but I didn’t much mind my position, because I enjoyed my work, and if I dare say so myself, I was pretty darn good at it.

Elvis was going on about peace in the valley over in the corner, and I thought there was definitely a difference between peace and quiet. Even though we weren’t at odds or anything, the silence that fell between my stoic employer and I sometimes felt like a challenge, a dare to come up with anything that he might find interesting. It wasn’t exactly condescending either, just a complete lack of desire to know my thoughts and feelings.

Luckily for me, I could think and feel all by my lonesome, and be quite happy without his taciturn replies and noncommittal shrugs. I did miss the everyday conversation sometimes, but, like my mother told me when I was growing up, “You have enough words in you to drown out a hurricane.” I guess it was meant to dissuade me from chattering on and on, but I chose not to let it faze me and instead replied by recapping the last town meeting we’d been to, and wasn’t it interesting about the Jacksons dog always running over to play in the Greens’ garden. Maybe it was that the grass smelled better? Mother shrugged and turned her back, and I guess I made her point for her.

Also, being under eighty and relatively intelligent, I knew how to operate both a phone and a computer, so my friends were never really far away.

He drank the water, standing right there as I picked up the dish cloth and kept cleaning the kitchen, sans hip-jerking. I had just finished preparing dinner, and the lasagna was in the oven, the salad on the counter, and the table already set. He put the glass down, wiping his mouth on his sleeve, rocking back on his heels.

I looked up.

Usually, by now he would be striding out of the room without a word of thanks. I stopped what I was doing and gave him a questioning look, waiting for him to say whatever he was thinking.

It took him a full minute.

“Are we having lasagna?”

I nodded, “Yes, and salad. With that dressing you like.” That dressing was a tart caper dressing my grandmother had taught me. He was one of the few I knew who really liked the stuff. I had served it to him the first time as a joke, sour salad dressing for a sourpuss. It didn’t work as intended when he asked for more, but I secretly liked that he liked it. I was also one of the few who did, and I considered it a secret thing we had in common. I could just imagine the face he would make if he ever knew.

“Good. Good.” He nodded, rapping his knuckles on the wood in front of him. Again, he rocked on his feet. Elvis’ one-sided love affair gave the situation another layer of absurdity as I stared him down, trying to understand this frivolous chit chat. Small talk. I didn’t think he was wholly capable of it, but he sure seemed to be trying. In fact, he was trying so hard I was afraid he might pop a blood vessel or something. I decided to help.

“Was there something else?” I asked, giving him the chance to spill it, whatever “it” was.

“No- well, yes. There was. Uhm..” he seemed to be sorting his thoughts, lining up his words, double-checking before letting them slip through his clenched teeth. “I am expecting a guest this week. Tomorrow, actually.”

That was an unexpected surprise. which, I guess, is a misnomer as a surprise is, by definition, unexpected. Today was Wednesday, so my weekly routine was definitely on a roll, and I had not even entertained the idea that someone might come to the house.

We never had visitors.

Well, that wasn’t quite true, I had visitors. I lived in an annex behind the main house, and when I say annex, I mean “two bedrooms, a bath, and an entertainment lounge”-annex. Needless to say, the main house was huge. So, because I could, and because he had never objected when I had friends or family over on my days off, I had visitors quite often. My social needs were too great to stay cooped up all the time without company, and since we rarely spoke I got my socializing done in other ways.

Still, he’d never once had guests for as long as I’d worked for him, and we were going on two years now. Curiouser and curiouser, I thought, and decided I would break etiquette and find out who would be important enough to warrant such a thing. “So, should I make up a bedroom? For your guest, I mean? And do they have any preferences I should consider?”

I tried to sound nonchalant, but his frown suggested he understood what I was trying to do. “Yes, please. And no, no preferences. It’s my sister.”

I gaped. This was the first I’d ever heard of a family. I thought maybe he was an only child whose parents had passed, seeing as we’d always spent the holidays alone. I mean, who doesn’t see their family for Christmas? Even I took a few days off to go see my parents, and though they were close enough that I could go see them whenever I wanted, I made a point to spend Christmas morning in my PJs, drinking mom’s hot chocolate and horsing around with dad.

I knew he stayed home, because I made up meals in advance and left them in the fridge with heating instructions, and they were always gone when I came back, the dirty dishes stacked in the dishwasher, and the house a casual mess from one person lounging about all day. A secret family had never once entered my mind, and I felt questions bubbling up, but quickly managed to choke them down.

“Okay! I’ll get right on that after dinner.” I said a little too enthusiastically. Immediately, my brain started galloping, considering the changes a house guest would mean for our routines, and what needed to be done, bought, straightened, and so on. I turned and shut Elvis off. I needed my mind to stop dancing for a minute before I toppled over from all the different directions it was trying to go, and this was one instance when Elvis’ hunk of burnin’ love would not be helpful.

___

 

We had dinner that night in relative silence, him picking at his food more than usual, making it seem like he wasn’t interested, but somehow making the whole plate of food disappear in minute bites. I’d always wondered at that, the way he ate. Whether it had something to do with his upbringing, or if he simply didn’t like eating in front of others. He never asked to eat separately though, and so we never did.

I was always glad of the company, although a pet of some kind would probably have paid me more attention, begging for food. Maybe that was it, I was too easy with the food, serving him up, left and right.

Maybe I should start to hold back. _Yes, you can have some, after you’ve told me about your day._ The thought made me smile, then cringe. Presumably, he had gotten by without me before he decided he wanted the help. Probably, he would just stop eating in the dining room. Or make his own meals, and that just wouldn’t do, because then, next thing you know, he would be cleaning and tidying up, and then where would we be? Him, alone and neurotic, and me, homeless and without a job. I guess blackmail was off the table. Maybe I’d just ask.

“So”, I said. “Your sister is coming tomorrow?” He nodded but didn’t look up from his plate. I kept digging, “When?”

He chewed silently for a bit, seemingly thinking again, making those dastardly words line up. He swallowed. “Around six pm, I believe. She wasn’t very clear. Before dinner, though.”

Okay. I could work with that. “I’ll need to go shopping tomorrow morning, we don’t really have enough supplies for guests. I’ll leave breakfast out for you, if that’s okay.” I went back to my own food, not really tasting it, waiting for his reply.

He thought about it, then mumbled, “Sure. That’s okay. Whatever you need.”

I let out a breath I didn’t know I’d been holding. Usually, a break in the routines demanded an explanation. Not that I had to account for my movements every second of every day, but he had a schedule, centered around meals, that we had to follow. I didn’t really know what happened when we went off course, either due to some unforeseen circumstance, or just because I hadn’t planned it well enough. The result was invariably the same: he’d stress, fidget, stalk around the house, and lose his appetite. Sometimes, sitting down and focusing on some menial task would help, but mostly we would just have to wait for it to pass, which could take a whole day, if not longer.

If he knew there’d be a disruption to his routine in advance, he could cope just fine. It had only happened three or four times since I’d started working for him, and those occasions were either because I’d taken ill, he’d taken ill, or someone had forgotten the time. We were fairly boring people most days and sticking to our simple routine caused no trouble for either of us.

On the occasion that I had to leave for a few days, he would know. There would always be food made up for him, and he would heat it on his own. We had discovered, through trial and error, that four days was the maximum he was comfortable with my being gone. This strange situation, needing me in the house to feel comfortable, yet never really interacting with me when I was, might appear paradoxical, but it was what he needed, and essentially what I was paid for. I’d googled housekeeping salaries when I was first hired, trying to get some handle on what to expect, and I knew I was getting paid considerably more than what my just above average cooking skills and pretty good cleaning habits were worth. It was a system that worked, and which suited us both.

We finished our meal in silence, the grandfather clock in the corner somehow ticking twice as loud as normal. Food still on his plate, he rose awkwardly, nodded to me and stalked off to his room. I stared down at my almost untouched plate, pasta and green leaves crushed together in an unappetizing heap. I was not the kind of girl to leave food on my plate, but this time, I didn’t think I could finish. I had an ominous feeling about this visit, and I just hoped we would make it through the weekend without starving or ending up in a stressed-out pile of “couldn’t be bothered to move”. I cleared the table and went to bed, missing my usual never-ending optimism. I hoped sleep would bring it back. I suspected I would need it.


End file.
